ALAIN MABANCKOU genially holds court at Jip’s, an Afro-Cuban salsa bar in Les Halles, central Paris. In a faded denim jacket and his signature flat cap, he modestly shares news of his burgeoning career and tricontinental travels with members of Paris’s black communities—from Guadeloupe to Guinea. Whether barmen or budding writers, they could have stepped straight off any page written by this Franco-Congolese novelist who, over the past decade, has come to be known as Africa’s Samuel Beckett.

Mr Mabanckou came to France from Congo-Brazzaville to study law in 1989, but quit as a corporate lawyer within a decade. Now 45, he talks expansively about his passion for reading and rumba music, and with disdain about President Denis Sassou-Nguesso’s “soft dictatorship” in the former French colony he revisits each year. But Mr Mabanckou’s probing thoughtfulness (and the bear hugs he offers old acquaintances) give little hint of the comic savagery of his fiction. Its exuberant satire extends to a Rabelaisian pissing contest whose participants map France in spray, and a morbid parody of the serial-killer genre that owes as much to Albert Camus’s “The Outsider” as to Bret Easton Ellis.

With nine novels to his name, along with six volumes of poetry, a biographical homage to James Baldwin, a gay American civil-rights writer, and a clutch of literary prizes, Mr Mabanckou broke new ground when he recently swapped his prestigious French publisher, Le Seuil, for the even more prestigious Gallimard. His fictionalised memoir of childhood, “Demain J’Aurais Vingt Ans” (“Tomorrow I Will Be 20”), came out under Gallimard’s august La Blanche imprint. For nearly a century, La Blanche’s distinctive cream covers have been the entry ticket to the canon of French literature. Mr Mabanckou is the first writer from Francophone black Africa to be included, and is now published alongside Marcel Proust and Jean-Paul Sartre. A Légion d’Honneur quickly followed. Presenting it in March, France’s culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand, gushed over him, calling him “Mabancool” and a “shining ambassador for the French language”.

Since his first novel, “Bleu Blanc Rouge” (1998), ironically saluted the French tricolor in its title, Mr Mabanckou’s fiction has moved between the dashed dreams of migrants in Paris and the ills of post-independence Africa, with its kleptocratic dictators and fratricidal wars. Yet, insisting on laughter in the midst of desperation, he sugars the pill of criticism with humour that veers from the gently ironic to the bawdy or macabre. “African Psycho” (2003) skewers consumerism through the inept Grégoire, a deadbeat petty criminal who botches all attempts to become a serial killer. It also makes fun of rivalries between Mr Mabanckou’s “little Congo” and the formerly Belgian “big Congo”—one land carved up by European powers.It was surely an ironic moment. For Mr Mabanckou is a subversive, who views the language he learnt aged six as a “river to be diverted”. Many of his models in breaking the “chains of ‘pure’ French”, as he calls them, are Anglophone writers, such as Nigeria’s Amos Tutuola, who have a longer history of remoulding English to their own ends. Rebelling against the rules of the Académie Française (the official authority on the French language—and one that has no equivalent in English), Mr Mabanckou’s freewheeling prose marries classical French elegance with Paris slang and a Congolese beat. It weds the oral culture of his unlettered mother (the dedicatee of all his books) to an omnivorous bibliophilia encouraged by his stepfather, a hotel receptionist in Pointe-Noire on the Atlantic coast. In “Broken Glass” (2005) a disgraced schoolteacher retells the hard-luck stories of habitués of a Congolese bar, with drunken momentum and not a single full stop. The author incorporates the titles of about 300 of the books he feels made him a writer, from Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s “Death on Credit”, to Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”.

In “Broken Glass” the chronicler/narrator virtually lives in a bar that goes by the name of Credit Gone West. For the author, an African bar is an open-air laboratory crammed with the educated jobless, an inventive forum for debate. “Memoirs of a Porcupine” (2006) forms a loose sequel. Its tongue-in-cheek fable of a porcupine that has to kill for its human double is ostensibly written by the same sozzled scribe, who is himself called Broken Glass. The novel draws on oral lore and parables in its sly critique of those who use traditional beliefs as a pretext for violence.

“Black Bazar” (2009) returns to Paris, exposing prejudices between African and Antillean, or between west and central Africans, to dispel notions of black harmony. The main figure, Fessologue, is a Congolese sapeur or sharp-dresser. As a boy, Mr Mabanckou was fascinated by the dandies who returned from Paris obsessed with brand names, but the novel lampoons the idea of tailoring as a political statement.

Mr Mabanckou’s work has been translated into 16 languages, including Korean and Polish. But the English-speaking world has been slow to catch on to his cutting charm. Only three of his books have come out in English (with an English version of “Black Bazar” on the way). And they are published by small, sharp-eyed firms: Soft Skull Press in America and Serpent’s Tail in Britain. That may change, though, now that he is a tenured professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he spends eight months each year.

Mr Mitterrand may regard Mr Mabanckou as an exotic flower in France’s literary garland, but the author is convinced that metropolitan France is no longer the centre of French literature. As Gallimard has recognised, writers from outside France are the ones now snatching the prizes and carrying the influence of French abroad. Mr Mabanckou proves that.

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